Elena Yurgeneva woke up Tuesday at her home in Rublyovka, a gated community for Moscow’s elite, to the bang of drone strikes, shaking walls and major shifts in customer demand.
“A lot of people seem anxious and ask about properties that have bunkers or at least basements,” said Yurgeneva, a real estate broker who specializes in luxury homes.
For Muscovites, a house in Yurgenieva’s book has a 200-square-meter reinforced-concrete bunker that allows its owner “to survive any unforeseen event in safety, and even in considerable comfort.” It’s a sign of the times.
Tuesday’s drone attack was one of Moscow’s largest since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, underscoring how vulnerable the country has become in a war.
More than a year after the attack began, Russia is further away than ever from battlefield victory, with plans to bolster Moscow’s air defenses rather than take Kiev as President Vladimir Putin had planned.
The growing number of attacks on Russian soil pales in comparison to Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian cities.But they scared even Moscow beautiful world Much of the aftermath of the war has so far remained untouched, despite striking recruiting posters on Rublyovka.
Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Center for Russia in Eurasia, said the defensive Kremlin was being forced to “act like it was routine”. “Our goal is not to escalate the situation,” she said. “No one in the Kremlin wants people to wake up.”
In Moscow, most locals went about their business in the hours after Tuesday’s attack. “We haven’t heard anything, there seems to be little change in the city today: restaurant terraces are open, people are enjoying Aperol Spritz,” said a resident who lives three kilometers from a building on Leninsky Prospekt, south of Moscow, where one of the planes was unmanned. The plane crashed. .
But Ukraine’s apparent increased ability to strike deep inside Russia is troubling.
In a survey last week by the pro-Kremlin pollster FOM, 52% of respondents said their friends and family were “anxious” rather than “calm” – the highest result in January, It is also the first shift since Russia ended its mobilization. end of last year.
Tuesday’s attack was the latest in a string of drone strikes, cross-border raids and sabotage behind enemy lines that have grown in recent weeks ahead of an expected Ukrainian counteroffensive.
Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for any of the attacks. But their goal appears to be to weaken Russian morale and divert resources away from the front lines — moves that would help Ukraine repel Russian advances.
“If they’re going to strengthen Moscow’s air defenses, that means they’re going to have to weaken air defenses elsewhere. That’s what Ukraine is aiming for,” said Pavel Luzin, a visiting scholar at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy .
The attacks have also raised concerns among supporters of the West in Ukraine. They have repeatedly insisted to Kiev officials that NATO-supplied weapons to the country would not be involved in any attack on Russian territory.
The U.S. has reiterated the limits of its support after pro-Kiev Russian militias used U.S.-made Hummers and MaxxPro light tactical vehicles to raid the Belgorod region from Ukraine last week. “In general, we do not support attacks inside Russia,” a National Security Council official said.
But while Ukrainian officials have publicly denied the attack on Russian soil, Western officials believe Kiev is behind several operations on its enemy’s home soil.
“They (Ukrainians) see Russian-occupied areas as equally fair as targets inside Russia,” one person said, adding that it was seen as “for defensive purposes”.
In Russia, hardline nationalists urged the Kremlin to respond to the attack by abandoning any semblance of normalcy in Moscow and declaring a state of all-out war.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the notorious Wagnerian paramilitary group, released an inarticulate voice memo following the drone attack in which he accused the Ministry of Defense of Fall asleep while driving.
“How the hell did you get these drones to fly to Moscow?” Prigozhin shouted. “What is the average person supposed to do when a drone loaded with explosives flies through a window?”
But a senior official in the Moscow mayor’s office said life soon returned to normal. “There is no panic in the establishment . . . this is not the first drone attack on Moscow,” he said. “Things do appear to be relatively normal.”
Moscow’s general indifference has fueled resentment among residents along Russia’s border with Ukraine, where drone strikes have been commonplace for much of the past year.
“They are simply not used to drone strikes and incoming artillery fire like ours,” said Sergei, a resident of the Belgorod region bordering Ukraine.
“When I hear a bang, my first thought is an explosion. But when people in Muscovites hear a bang that turns out to be an explosion, their first thought is that a lightning storm is coming,” Schell said. Guy added.
The regular attacks have radicalized Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov, who said on Monday the region was in a “de facto state of war”. The only way to protect it from Ukrainian artillery fire, he claimed, was to annex neighboring Kharkiv — a step not even Putin suggested.
Shebekino, a town of about 40,000 residents just a stone’s throw from the Ukrainian border, was one of the hardest-hit towns and regularly featured in Gladkov’s social media posts.
Although locals initially tried to ignore the regular shelling and drone strikes, that changed one day in late October; Shebekino’s “Galeria” mall burned down after the shelling, and another mall was partially destroyed. “That’s when people started to understand the seriousness of the situation,” said local blogger Alexander.
After these incidents, some entrepreneurs chose to close their businesses, while others began sandbagging windows. Some families are starting to leave. Others questioned how long they could endure the constant onslaught.
Although Alexander chose to stay in Shebekino, he started saving money in case he needed to start over elsewhere. Like other residents, he was used to the interruption of water and electricity caused by the shelling, just as the children were used to the closure of schools.
“Some people started to feel that Shebekino had been completely abandoned,” Alexander said. Locals are angry that state TV hosts keep mispronouncing its name and often refer to the city as a village or a settlement, which he says downplays the danger.
Tensions have escalated in recent days, especially after pro-Ukrainian militias attacked the area. Locals, spooked by sirens, had fled to bomb shelters — only to find many of them closed, unprepared and even flooded, Alexander said.
Luzin of Tufts University said the widening gap fueled longstanding complaints about the concentration of wealth and power in Moscow, threatening to further erode Russian popular support for the war.
“There was a lot of gloating, even joy in many parts of Russia when Moscow was attacked,” Luzin said. “People are not just tired of war, they are tired of growing poverty and inequality between the capital and the regions.”
“A lot of them would be happy if Moscow got bombed more — especially if instead of ordinary people dying, drones were blowing up over gated communities, government ministries and the Kremlin,” he added.
Additional reporting by Felicia Schwartz in Washington